Wearable Linux: Notes from the Field - page 6

Business Now Embracing Wearable Linux

If Microsoft came promising more consumer
goodies by way of MP3 players and a "rich
portable experience," Professor Mann came
promising a total change in the way we experience
technology.

All this computing, he said, would happen
without the user having to experience mouse or
keyboard, program or application: he's striving
for nothing more than the smooth integration of
the "real world" and the enhancements to that
world technology can offer.

Through
pattern recognition, he suggested, the
computer-mediated display a wearable computing
user sees could be used to filter billboards or
ads on the fly, creating a sort of "real world"
Junkbuster.

More immediately, using compressed video, a
living diary of rapid-fire images could be
collected over a lifetime, available for instant
recall. Covertly, the same approach could be used
to document human rights abuses, and to turn the
tables on institutions that ban observations of
their own activities, even as they train more and
more cameras on those that pass through their
doors.

For the visually impaired, Mann
mentioned work done in combining radar and
tactile feedback to provide a sense of one's
environment. For motorists, he mentioned the use
of on-the-fly highlighting of cars approaching at
an unsafe speed. At that point, he had my
attention completely.

Even if wearable computing could spare me
ever having to lay eyes on another "Got Milk?"
ad... even if it could empower me to challenge
the arbitrary power structures of the analog
world, and even if, as one brief clip he showed
indicated, it could be used to tell you you're
looking at Alan Alda if he walked up to you on
the street through facial feature matching, I was
much more interested in something that might make
me less likely to get creamed on 495. I spent a
minute lost in the fantasy of having a real
tickle between my shoulder blades to tell me I
was about to be taken out by an angry Mercedes
driver instead of whatever sense it was that
pulled through for me in its erratic and
intangible way earlier that day.

The word "Linux" popped up, though, so I
snapped back to the conference room.

Like another Canadian, Red Hat's Bob Young,
Mann has a favorite saying about his choice of
operating systems:

"It's hard to work on an auto when the hood's
welded shut."

Mann applauded the recent French initiatives
to mandate Open Source software for government
institutions, and said he hoped a governmental
ban against "viral" and closed-source operating
systems would force industry to follow suit.

There was a lot to take in, and Professor
Mann's talk ran over at the urging of the
audience. Mann has some tall orders to fill,
between redefining the lines between "media" and
"reality," toppling institutional oppression,
crushing proprietary software, and making sure we
all recognize Alan Alda when we bump into him on
the street. Some in the audience were clearly
entertained and intrigued, and a few looked a
little dazed.

Outside the conference room, though, grad
student James Fung was able to sum it all up:

"Professor Mann says computers are the first
tools that can be used for purposes the
manufacturer never intended, and that's what
we're doing."